Dynamic Enterprise Featured Article

OpenTouch Enhances User and Organizer Experiences at Major French Music Festival

To get a good idea if an IP telephony and/or network infrastructure solution will work, try it out on 200,000 people in a concentrated area. When users converge on a single location, let’s just say this is a very meaningful stress test.

The logistics of the festival are quite daunting – more than 500 are employed to run the event, which needs another 5,500 volunteers to operate smoothly. As the festivals users became increasingly more mobile in the communications habits, it became clear that the organizers would have to do something about the network traffic. Organizers needed a flexible solution that would provide the radio coverage they needed in the festival’s rural location. This would not only give the audience what they needed, but allowed the network organizers to communicate between their critical staff, such as security and vendors as wells as the marketers.OpenTouch was picked for its communication suite, which can offer users the improved ergonomics and innovative functions that include everything from real-time communications to web conferencing abilities. The festival now benefits from the deployment of the:

OmniSwitch 9702 and 6250-P24, which boosted the infrastructure to a level that could accommodate 200,000 users

Without a network infrastructure or IP telephony solution like that offered by OpenTouch, the festival’s participants and staff would have been left in a communication black hole.

The first bit of hardware to go in, according to the case study, was the OmniPCX Enterprise telephone servers. These devices allowed staff at the farthest reaches of the 30-acre parking lot to communicate with someone backstage in the 15-acre music area.

The IP telephony and network infrastructure solution also allowed festival organizers to create a call center number that could take emergency calls providing an added layer of security and safety for the mass of people over the life of the four-day festival. But not everything was wireless – OpenTouch also utilizes the OmniTouch 8082 IC phone system, which is a new type of smart landline solution.

Just this year, Alcatel-Lucent provided the mobile Wi-Fi technology with smartphone applications which allowed organizers to set up one aerial antenna which would reach out to the organizers. As a result, these individuals were able to leverage only one device from which to communicate rather than a multitude they once used to communicate with the various volunteers through the expanse of the festival grounds.

So if you are having a corporate function for up to 200,000 or more customers, and wish to allow them to take full advantage of their BYODs, while at the same time enabling your staff to operate at optimal efficiency, the festival experience might be music to your ears.